Chantal Delsol, Babel, and Pentecost

I concluded the Songbook #6 essay by quoting Chantal Delsol in partial defense of, or rather, in sympathetic re-conceptualization of, the idealistic anti-war impulse. Delsol is a philosophic, essayistic, “anthropological,” Tocquevillian, and Catholic analyst of our present “late modern” situation, of what we should have learned from the horrors of the 20th century and the witness of the dissidents, and, in Unjust Justice , of the potential “tyranny of international law.” I don’t think we at Postmodern Conservative can do too much to introduce her to American audiences.

Since tomorrow is Pentecost Sunday, it seems a good time to give readers another taste of her thinking, one which better explains the comment I quoted at the end of Songbook #6, and why she is so critical of the third-type of “pacifism” discussed therein. Earlier in the book, she uses the Tower of Babel story to discuss the hubris of the contemporary trans-nationalist push towards world government, and on page 103, she says this:

“The Christian response to the story of Babel is Pentecost. Then, in a moment of grace that transcends history, the disciples were granted a perfect agreement that rose above particular languages. The true consequence of the Stoic and Pauline postulate is not a political search for the concrete unity of the various moralities and justices of history. It is the quest for communion by beings who acknowledge their various particularities. This spiritual postulate requires a spiritual response. A world government would only be a grotesque—and no doubt violent—caricature of the Catholic Church and of Stoic cosmopolitanism.”

“In the contemporary version of the unity of the human race, that unity is sapped of its true spirit, which is hope . It ceases being hopeful when it becomes a process of construction, the expectation of a result. . . . [this version] does not know, or it ignores, the option of hope , of walking on an indefinite path towards the good. In this way, advocates of international law and world government are the heirs of the ideologues of the twentieth century. They aim to immanentize a spiritual good.”

Our thanks to the great Paul Seaton for translating this work.